C is for ... Chukwa

 

Chukwa

 

 

“You look terrible.” Susanna said, and Cassie couldn’t tell from her tone if ‘concern’ or ‘gloating’ was the intention behind the observation.

     “Yeah, well thanks for that.” Cassie fired back. She took a slug of liquid caffeine from her travel mug. “Still, seeing as we’re playing ‘say what you see’, you look fat in that dress.”

     Susanna laughed.

     “I’ve never looked fat in anything.” She said.

     They both laughed.

     “I’m just tired.” Cassie said. “Very, very tired.”

     Susanna raised an eyebrow.

     “A new boy toy?”

     “Don’t be daft. I still haven’t recovered from the last one.”

     “Sometimes you have to get back on the … horse.” Susanna raised both eyebrows this time.

     “It’s nothing to do with my lack of a love life.”

     “Honest, your honour.”

     “I’ve just got a lot on my mind …”

     “That’s your problem, girl. You worry about things too much. Sometimes I think you’re trying to carry the weight of the world around on your shoulders.”

     Cassie winced, looked down. Susanna didn’t notice, and why should she?  She was already getting up from the table.

“Anyway, tea break is over, I’m returning to my desk before Landell notices I’ve been here wa-a-ay too long. Catch you at lunch?”

     Cassie dared to look up.

“Sure.” She said.

     Susanna hurried off, leaving Cassie in the break room, alone. Susanna was right, Cassie knew. She did look terrible. Face drawn and pale, dark circles around her eyes, hair lank and lustreless.

     It was true, she was tired.

     But that was just part of it.

     There was a reason she was tired.

     She was being haunted.

     Haunted by an idea.

     An idea that was stupid.

     An idea that would not leave her alone.

     She sipped her coffee. It tasted bitter.

 

She’d been worrying about it for over a week now.

     A middle-of-the-night thought that had taken root and stubbornly refused to die. Daylight hadn’t shifted it. Neither had logic. Neither had the passage of time.

     The thing was: the thought hadn’t just stuck; it had started growing. Growing at an alarming rate. Sometimes it was all she would think about. Sometimes it was all she could think about.

Madness, she was sure.

She was losing her mind.

It was the only explanation.

Led to the brink of self-dissolution by a dream.

Because everything – the thought, then the word, then the mental turmoil – had all started with a bloody dream.

Now, she didn’t see herself as the kind of person who put any stock in oneiric flotsam and jetsam. To her, dreams were just the brain sorting things out; filing memos, documents, images, sensations, emotions, encoding what it found useful, what it wanted, discarding what it didn’t. Dreams were a nocturnal editor and admin clerk, and not worthy of a second thought.

Sigmund Freud might have made reputational and financial capital from writing about dreams – and many new-age scribblers had followed his lead, although with even less scientific rigour – but for Cassie they were foolish and irrelevant. Interpreting dreams was simply pareidolia. Pattern-seeking animals end up seeing patterns where none exist, and any attempt to draw meaning from those patterns was doomed to failure. Or worse, ill-informed success.

But, and it was a big but here, her dream – and its subsequent thought – had pretty much taken over her life. Had reconfigured her consciousness into a machine for processing a single thought, for understanding a bloody dream.

So.

The dream, then:

 

infinity

 

                        She has no idea where she is. She is just aware of

                        the vast immensity of the universe as it spreads out

                        around her. She just is. She exists. That is all. All that

matters.

Time passes.

Or space passes and it just looks like time to

her…

Slowly, she becomes aware of … of others.

She has no idea where her body ends and

the others begin, but she feels them there around her.

Pressed in.

Pressed in tight.

Impossibly tight.

Other people

                       [but that’s not quite accurate]

other beings

                           [closer, but still no cigar]

 just ‘others’ will have to do.

She is not even sure she is a ‘people’ now. She

too is an ‘other’. Less an individual being, and more a

tessellating component of some vast

            [structure?]

                        [machine?]

                                    [organism?]

                                                [god?]

She isn’t even sure that she is separate from the cosmic

Immensity she is part of. Maybe she is just an organ that

has suddenly become sentient. Or a skin cell that just

gained a soul.

            She feels the weight of the vast mass pressing down

on her, squeezing her, flattening[?] her …

 

 

She awakes with a lurching start, a scream locked in a throat that refuses to release the tension it creates by becoming a sound. Her room falls into focus and the thought is born.

     Her bedroom – her sanctuary – becomes the delivery room of the thought and will forever remain tainted by that fact.

     The thought is, in truth, made possible by the familiarity of the room into which she awoke.

     The thought.

     Six words.

     Six words to shake her world to its absolute core. To haunt her waking hours. To nag and scrape and chip away at the illusion of comfort she had surrounded herself with.

     Six words.

     What if THIS is the dream?  

     World shattered.

All that remains is for the pieces to fall.

 

And then there was the word.

     Six letters.

     After the six words, the six letters.

     She saw the word everywhere.

 

The first time:

     She is walking down the High Street. Dragging herself through a world she is no longer convinced is real. Her brain feels like a blister: hot and swollen and full of sickly liquid. People pass by but she can no longer trust in the certainty of their existence. She avoids meeting a man’s eye and instead looks at a stand of newspapers outside a 7-11.

     A headline catches her eye:

     THOUSANDS WATCH UK WARSHIP SINK IN CHANNEL

     She feels something roll around in her head, and then the headline’s spacings shift, like a pulse in her head forces the letters into a different configuration.

     THOUSANDS WAT CHUKWA RSHIP SINK IN CHANNEL

The new word formed near the centre of the sentence brings bile to her throat.

     CHUKWA

She has no idea why the word makes her feel like another part of her world just broke. It’s not a word she has ever seen before. Hell, it’s gibberish.

Still, everything else in her mind was pretty much grinding itself to gravel and dust, so why not throw in a nonsense word to put fear and horror and the feeling of her world ending into the mix, just to really stir the bloody pot.

     She jams her eyes shut. Tight. Clenches her jaw. Tight. And when she opens her eyes again the headline has returned to its original spacing. To make perfect sense again.

     The proprietor of the shop is staring at her from his position in the shop, in relative darkness behind the counter, but his eyes seem to glow with a pale luminescence that seems to look into her soul and she tears herself away from the newsstand and bustles down the street, mind racing out of control and …

 

The second time:

     … the bus thunders past her, then hisses as it brakes and she is startled by both noises and looks to her right and the side of the bus, bar the windows, has been consumed by a gaudy advertisement for the latest fragrance from Dior. A woman with her head thrown back in what looks like ecstasy, airbrushed to within an inch of her becoming a cartoon, hair flowing behind her in a perfect arc, with the copy for the ad reading simply:

     The New Fragrance from Dior: CHUKWA

and her mind, reeling from so many punches, feels like meat beneath this latest blow. She reels away, her lips moving in a mantra

     no no no no no no no no no no

to try to banish the sight, banish the word, banish those six letters before they drive her out of her godamned mind and she keeps her eyes down to the pavement, her eyes squeezed almost shut so anything she does see down there is just a blur, and she stumbles, wheels, reels and almost breaks into a fight-or-flight run but she remember a line from a James Bond book, about once being nothing of note, of two being coincidence, so it’s just that, random coincidence, nothing more. Nothing more. Nothing more than that. Nothing.

     She reaches the underpass that takes her across to the other side of the street and onto her workplace, and she scuttles underground. Away from a world that no longer makes sense to her. It’s cooler and darker down there and it serves to quell the panic that she was on the very edge of falling over. Sure it smells of urine, sure it’s strewn with litter and used condoms and a couple of hypodermic syringes, at least it isn’t trying to drive her out of her mind.

     She feels weak, faint even, and steadies herself with a hand on the underpass wall, but it feels odd to her. Its texture is smooth and slightly warm, but feels organic rather than built. She sucks in a breath and looks at the wall.

     Just a wall. Graffiti-covered, but a wall. She starts to relax …

The third time:

     … and then sees the elaborate design sprayed onto the wall with almost exquisite skill. The metallic paints depict a cartoon tortoise or turtle, up on its hind legs, a baseball cap twisted on its head in that casual way she so hates, skateboarding a cliff-top of letters, six of them, beautifully rendered, easy to read:

     CHUKWA

     A nail of horror is driven deep into her brain, so acute it might as well have been a physical pain. She stumbles, falls to her knees, and it’s like she’s genuflecting before a depiction of a saint.

She whimpers in lieu of a prayer.

 

When she had regained her composure, she’d gone into work. There was mud on the knees of her trousers, and she’d made some stupid excuse about getting knocked over by a man who hadn’t seen her in his path and that had bought her tea and biscuits and sympathy and normality. It was the sense of normality that she had needed the most, and it had steadied her mental equilibrium, so much so that she was ridiculously glad to get to her desk and let spreadsheets impose order on her chaos.

     She’d worked the rest of the day within the narrow parameters of office life. Susanna had joined her at lunch, and the day had got back on its proper path, like it had been before the dream, the thought, the word, and it was only when 5 o’clock started moving into view that she’d started thinking about it all again.

     More to dispel the nonsense than in expectation of an answer she’d fired up her web browser and typed CHUKWA into the search box.

Her finger was trembling as it hit ‘return’.

     No result would have been better than the ones she got.

     A Tibetan language.

     Some open-source software.

     The World Turtle of Hindu mythology.

     She clicked on a link for the last, and it took her to the Wikipedia entry for ‘World Turtle’. The picture on the right-hand side showed a turtle supporting elephants supporting the world.

     She closed the browser, grabbed her purse and phone from her desk, and headed off home.

She didn’t say goodbye to anyone on her way out.

     She took a taxi and didn’t look out of its windows.

 

That night she dreamed again.

 

infinity

(bounded by a half-shell)

 

                        She feels the weight as soon as the dream begins.

                                    Immense weight.

She tries to move, but that isn’t happening. She tries

to look around her, but yeah, ditto, that’s not possible either.

                                    Time passes.

                                    Or space passes and she can’t tell the difference.

                                    A lot of time.

                                    She tries to get a sense of the others pressed in around

                        her, but there’s only the knowledge that they’re there, with no

                        further insights available.

She realises that she has been here for a long time. Not

days or weeks or years or even centuries, but a period of

                        deep time, where even aeons look like a quick lunch break

                        on the go.

                                    Eternity.

                                    Pressed in. Weighed down.

                                    For eternity.

 

She woke up and the thought was back.

     What if THIS is the dream?

     She showered and breakfasted on autopilot.

     Took the bus to work.

     CHUKWA was everywhere.

     On billboards and bus passes, on street signs and in supermarket windows, on phone screens and posters, on currency and car number plates.

     World turtle.

     A creature that supports the world.

     She’d read about it in Stephen King and Terry Pratchett, and it had always made her smile. Oh, it hadn’t been called CHUKWA in either of those, she was sure, but she’d loved the image. She’d loved the question she’d once heard ‘but what is the turtle standing on?’ and loved the answer ‘a bigger turtle’. And she’d loved the phrase that had come from that, that had provided a mind-blowing image of infinity and a perfect name for infinite regress: ‘turtles all the way down’.

     Now the idea just made her feel sick.

    

The days and nights blurred.

     By day she was a cog that was losing teeth in a machine that was only too happy to grind them away from her. By night she was a surface that bore weight, aware but utterly incapable of action.

     Until Susanna came back for lunch to find that Cassie hadn’t moved, was just staring into a far distance, crying.

 

The psychiatrist was nice. The sign on his door said Doctor Chukwa. He got her sat down and listened to her speak, and then he folded his hands in front of him, and looked at her with his wise and kindly face. He wore a bow-tie with a repeated motif that Cassie didn’t want to focus upon. Just in case.

     “Well.” Doctor Chukwa said. “That’s quite a tale. What do you think it means?”

     Cassie spoke in something monotonous and joyless.

     “I think I’m a part of the world turtle that supports the Earth. I think that all of this…” She gestured around her, “…is the dream that I escape to make infinity less … tedious, I suppose.”

     “So I am in your dream?”

     “Your name on the door is Doctor Chukwa…”

     “It actually says Doctor Chowdhry, but let that go for now. I don’t feel like I’m in your dream. I have a whole history, it’s very detailed, I can assure you. It will contain lots of details about growing up in India that you cannot possibly know. Would you like to hear some of it?”

     Cassie shook her head.

     “Wouldn’t matter. If I’m right I have been a part of the turtle for … well, for eternity. Who knows how many other dreams I have had. How many other lives I have lived. Some of them might even have taken place in India.”

     The doctor clapped his hands.

     “It’s a perfect ‘brain in a jar’.” He said.

     “I’m sorry?”

     “The brain in a jar. How do we know we’re not brains in jars experiencing an elaborate simulation? We don’t. Can’t prove it one way or the other. But here’s the thing: do we live life as if we are brains in jars? I would say a most emphatic ‘no’.”

     “But how do we carry on when we know we are nothing more than a brain in a jar?”

     “Or a part of a World Turtle? We don’t know that. You don’t know that. You say that in your dreams you are aware of others, pressed in around you, I believe you said. Does that mean I am there too? Do I dream here too, to escape the pressure, the weight, of supporting everything we know on our plated, turtle back?”

     Cassie’s brow furrowed.

     “You could be on to something.” She said.

     “I know.” Doctor Chowdhry replied, smiling. “How do you think that knowledge is going to change my life?”

     “Completely?”

     “Not a bit.”

     “I’m sorry?”

     “I will not alter my life by a step. Not a beat. I will continue to help my fellow apes with their problems, I will go home to my wife and children, and I will love them no more nor less than I did before. It does not matter. Even if your dream is true, and it is true for me too, it does not mean you have interpreted it correctly.

     “You see this as a binary system. You are either awake or asleep. On or off. In one state you are the turtle. In the other you Cassie. You judge one to be a falsehood, the other to be a reality. I say that you cannot possibly make that judgement.

     “If you are the turtle, or a part of it, then conventional reality is nothing more than an illusion. We have seen the Earth from space, and we have not seen this turtle. I think NASA might have mentioned it in one of their press releases. So maybe you are looking at the same thing in two very different ways. Maybe it’s not a case of either/or. Maybe the answer is ‘both’. You are both the turtle, and the woman I see before me now. All that is different is your perception of reality.

     “So maybe through one set of lenses you are the turtle. And through another set you are Cassie. Maybe both are true. But only insofar as any perception can be said to be truth. And in this moment, it matters not.

     “Your life on earth is real. As real as it needs to be. It might be not the whole picture, but then what is? Maybe we are all the turtle, and it is our duty to support the planet on which we ourselves also live. The weight is the price we pay for the life.

     “Most of us do not remember the weight. They do not know that they are the Chukwa. Except, maybe, occasionally, in our dreams. I would state here that I believe the weight is worth the reward. That being the turtle is worth it, because we also get to be the person, and that is surely worth anything.”

     Cassie nodded.

     “It’s how we choose to look at it, isn’t it?” she asked.

“I mean, yeah, being the turtle is terrifying, but being the human doesn’t have to be.”

     “Exactly. We cannot know for sure, but if we get a human life – with all its sights, sounds, smells, feelings, art, beauty, nature and technology – because we are already the turtle then I can see no other way to view it. Our life is a reward for our burden.”

     Tears soaked Cassie’s cheeks as Doctor Chowdhry led her to the door.

     “Come back if you have any other concerns.” He told her.

     “I won’t have.” Cassie said. “You’re right. Life is worth it. It’s worth the price.”

     Doctor Chowdhry smiled and closed the door.

     The sign on the door said ‘Doctor Choudhry’.

 

When she was gone, the doctor took off his mask and whistled.

     “That was a close one.” He said.

     The phone on his desk rang.

     “Hi.” He said into the receiver. “Yes. She just left. I gave her the binary/life is a reward speech and she seems reassured. I’ll monitor the situation, but I think it was a blip.”

     He hung up and stroked his trunk, thoughtfully.

     Holding up an illusion was as hard as holding up a world, but it had its benefits.

     He reached into his desk drawer and took out a plastic tray of fruit salad.

     “Worth it.” He said.